Nick Blood From The Movie The Offering

Published: Jan. 12, 2023, 6 p.m.

In director Oliver Park's horror film The Offering (out Jan. 13) an ancient evil is accidentally unleashed at a Jewish morgue in Brooklyn. "It's about a young man who is returning to the Hasidic community in New York, for the first time in many years, to introduce his estranged father to his pregnant, non-Jewish wife," says Park. "His father works in a mortuary and, as they arrive, a body is brought in with something untoward hidden inside it. It's about this demon who is desperately trying to feed from a child and then there's the underbelly, which is about family, communication, and someone coming back to his roots." The Offering is written by Hank Hoffman, from a story by Hoffman and Jonathan Yunger, but Park was able to add some scares to the Millennium Media-produced movie he himself had literally dreamed up. "One of the things I did in the pitch was I told them one of my nightmares," says the director. When Millennium later asked if he'd had any more terrifying dreams, Park and Hoffman sent them "nine pages of scary scenes they could add to the movie, carefully drawing from authentic Jewish demonology." The film was shot not in Brooklyn but 5,000 miles away in Bulgaria.